Baker Mayfield will play at most, two more seasons at Oklahoma (remainder of Big 12 groans).
It only happened because the Big 12 got together, looked at an issue where there was divisiveness, came back the next day, and made the right call.
“The call” was a 7-3 vote a day after a split 5-5 vote allowing players who do not have a written scholarship offer to not be penalized a season for transferring, thus losing the eligibility.
On the surface, it seems kind of a basic decision to make. Had it not been a guy who finished in the top 5 in last year’s Heisman Trophy voting, it’s hard to tell if the issue would have gotten as much national play as it did, but the ends justify the means in this case.
It seems banal to think “hey. if a guy doesn’t have a scholarship and someone else offers him one, why wouldn’t he go?”
There were clearly dissenting views, but this was a classic case of doing what “your mother” always tells you to, which, in a disagreement, take a night, think it over, and then work to find actual collaboration rather than sticking your flag in the ground and refusing to budge.
That’s the main takeaway from this, and maybe people paid to argue more important legislation can heed the advice: My view isn’t always right, and often, I’ll get a decent amount of what I want if I just collaborate with those who have differing views.
Obviously, with these things in college sports, the slope gets slippery. If a player is a walk-on and makes an impact on a team, what’s to stop some other school from illegally recruiting him with promises of more playing time and a scholarship?
The rarity of that event happening, though, and the unique investigation that would have gone into it probably would vet out the wrongdoing. Hoping to have a leg up on Oklahoma for a season is really the only reason you vote against this one, and as we know, college football is a great place for false altruism.
Mayfield would have been eligible to play as a graduate transfer either way, so what this really does is not necessarily “gives” him another year of football, but it gives him another year of football at the institution he’s chosen to be at rather than become potentially a highly-sought-after chip in the ever growing game of graduate transfers.
Conferences should go farther, though, and extend this rule out to players that were on scholarship as well.
Big time college sports, especially football considering the inherent risks of the game and the short moneymaking window in the pros, is an environment where if you’re good enough, you grab the brass ring the second you have it.
Rules like these aren’t going to affect the player that’s an NFL lock. They’re going to affect the guys that are fringe impact players, for the most part. It’s entirely reasonable that Mayfield won’t use both years because if the NFL comes calling with guarantees of riches, he’d likely go.
Players shouldn’t be hamstrung from cleanly pursuing better options for themselves. The penalty of sitting out a season is a hefty one in and of itself. It’s the NCAA’s and fellow schools’ jobs to legislate institutions from not breaking the rules and “recruiting” players on someone else’s roster.
Mayfield being as elite as he is managed to shine a light on something that most of the college football world probably never thought twice about.
Credit the Big 12 for getting this one right, in a big way, and it happened because of a simple ability to take time and think about a problem, then collaborate to a proper solution.
